Production facilities of a plant are normally structured by extensive devices and systems such as field equipment, a controller or a programmable controller for controlling the field equipment, and so forth. Further, the plant is provided with a safety system for ensuring the safety of the plant, wherein the safety system generates an alarm when detecting abnormalities in the plant.
JP 2002-222012A discloses an invention wherein alarms of different categories are displayed on a single screen, and filtering of alarms is variably set.
As field equipment have been recently intelligible, respective field equipment per se have generated alarms. Further, as production facilities of a plant are complex, there is a tendency that a safety system becomes complex and multiplex. Safety of the plant has been conventionally ensured by separately displaying and managing the individual alarms generated from devices and systems.
However, since various alarm elements have been mixed in a plant, a problem has been encountered in that it becomes difficult to decide a priority of the importance of an alarm and so forth. In particular, in a development maker, or a plant having equipment and systems of different models which are mixed therein, various alarms can not be handled in unification, so that it becomes impossible to execute processing such as making an intelligent decision relative to the alarms in unification. Accordingly, there has been required a development of a system in which miscellaneous alarms are unified and presented, or in which various information processing are unified and executed relative to the alarms.
Meanwhile, equipment and systems constituting a plant are different from one another for every plant, and methods of handling alarms are different from one another in response to actual circumstances of the plant. Accordingly, it is necessary to set a method of unifying the alarms in response to the actual circumstances of the plant. Further, it is necessary to speedily respond to a case where equipment adopting an alarm of new model is introduced into a plant, and there is required a system capable of flexibly adapting to individual circumstances and variation in circumstances.